Pages

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Man of Clay Blog Tour

Always flattered to be a part of theGrab the Lapelsblog tours because Melanie Page is doing such wonderful things to get writers the exposure and attention they deserve. Today is the fourth day of CL Bledsoe’svirtual book tourcelebrating Man of
Clay, a novel with elements of
magical realism and a dash of steampunk. This funny, engaging story redefines
what Southern Literature is capable of being. Man of Clay can be pre-ordered today!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What
motivated you to write this particular novel?

I had to see how it ended.

I went through several false starts with the novel over the
last few years. It came together in bits and pieces in a way that was very
different from how novels usually come to me. I wrote the first section—about
the slave ship—immediately, and then went through several drafts of the next
fifty or so pages over a few years before finally sitting down and wrapping up
the last two-thirds fairly quickly. I’m usually more slow-and-steady about
writing.

There were several elements in the novel that really appealed
to me. I wanted to do a historical novel set in Arkansas to lay the groundwork
for a mythical history. I wanted to do a steampunk novel set on a plantation. I
wanted to write a golem book, but in America. As I started writing, I really
became interested in the slave characters, especially Othello, but the others
as well.

Your
characters elicited a number of emotions in me, especially hatred for Mr.
Winfrey and his sons. Can you talk a bit about how you developed this
character?

Mr. Winfrey, and his sons, are the plantation overseers.
Their defining quality is ruthlessness. I based Mr. Winfrey on a preacher I
used to work for. This was after high school, when I attended a community
college in a nearby town. I worked at a discount grocery store managed by this
Southern Baptist preacher who hired his sons—they were too young to work, at
first, and he had to get special permission and all that, so early on, they’d
just hang around the store. They were bullies, mostly to the black employees.
The preacher was a racist, and they were all just dirty people, dumb, mean, and
angry at the world, really almost caricatures of human beings. I reacted to
them kind of like how a cat reacts to having water thrown on it. So we’d butt
heads all the time. The preacher was eventually fired for stealing.

The worst thing about the preacher, for me, was his racism.
I overheard him talking about this and witnessed it in action: he’d hire black
employees every so often, because he felt that he had to, and then make up
reasons to fire them after a couple weeks. I didn’t realize this was happening,
of course, until afterwards. I could go on and on about this, but suffice to
say working there was an unpleasant experience for me.

I often shy away from writing characters like Mr. Winfrey
because it can be considered passé by some people—the over-the-top racist or
“evil” character just seems unreal. But I’ve known several people like that in
my life. According to Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, one in twenty people are psychopaths. So
they’re plenty real. Mr. Winfrey is fueled by anger, that old, white, male rage
at a world that just won’t behave the way he wants it to. He was kind of a fun
character to write because he’s so extreme. I don’t think a person could do the
job Mr. Winfrey did without being ruthless, and he needs his religiosity to
justify his behavior to himself, while remaining dumb enough to be controlled
by Master John.

Master
John is a surprising character, one who is a curious intellect, but also acts
ruthlessly. Can you describe your origins for this unusual slave master?

The inspiration for Master John came from certain Southern
aristocrats I’ve encountered over the years, holdovers from old Southern money.
Master John has lived his life with a certain kind of privilege, which was rare
and even more extreme, I think, back then. He truly believes he can make the
world do what he wants, that he can shape it through force of will. He’s
brilliant, but as a member of the slave-owning aristocracy, he lacks humanity.
I think it’s a mistake to equate racism, or any other kind of blind hatred,
with lack of intelligence. Plenty of slave owners demonstrated a certain
brilliance through writing or what-have-you. They simply lacked empathy, which
many would argue is more important and essential than intelligence.

Master John is even more ruthless than Mr. Winfrey because
he’s more intelligent. If they were alive today, Winfrey might be a cop,
abusing his power, while John would be the CEO of a bank, destroying the
economy.

Man of Clay forces
readers to ask how they define a man. Emet is declared not a man after he is
created. Slaves are also not considered “men,” yet Emet is jealous of them.
Could you talk a bit about your search for the definition of “man”?

I could answer this at great length in several different
ways, but I’m going to focus on Emet. It’s not so much a question of what
defines a man as how one should live, and to what end. Emet is a slave, but
lower than a slave, in a sense. But fairly early on, what he comes to envy is
the inimitable something he can’t define about the slaves. There’s a lack of
logic among them and the slavers, in a fundamental sense. He simply cannot
understand how they could behave in certain ways, whether it be loving or laughing
or what have you. This is the hermit's response to life; how can anyone laugh
when they know they’ll die someday? It makes no sense to him, which, of course,
it never can make sense, because it isn’t sensible. That’s the true gulf he
strives to cross, between himself and people.

What is
the role of the stories within your novel, like the tales of the slave Big John
and the turtle on the slave ship?

Well, hopefully, they’re fun and interesting. The real
purpose with them is to shed insight on the characters in a meaningful way.
They serve as extensions of the characters. Othello tells Big John stories,
which tell us about Othello, since these are the stories he chooses to tell,
and about the hopes and dreams of the slaves who like to hear them. There’s
something more to them than just blood, sweat, and tears. The turtle story,
likewise, touches on the spiritual element of the slaves—even these horribly
mistreated people have maintained a kind of magic about them, a spark.

The stories reveal the humanity of the characters and also
the wisdom they strive to follow.

When
you were writing Man of Clay,
did the ending seem like a natural conclusion for you, a place where you knew
you would end even as you started writing?

Actually, I had a different ending in mind, a more extreme
one, which I can’t really go into without spoiling the novel, but this was
before I actually wrote the book. The tone of it was similar, but the logistics
were a little different. I didn’t use that ending because I felt it would be
unbelievable. The ending I chose did feel inevitable. It grew from the story as
the only real ending it could have. Every novel chooses its own structure, its
own ending. As a writer, you just have to be open.

Why
might Man of Clay be a good
book club pick?

MOC is a mashup of several different styles—from historical
fiction to slave narrative with steam punk and elements of magical realism.
It’s funny at times and quite dark at times. All of these things could appeal
to a lot of different people. Even though it has some unusual elements, and
unusual characters, they’re easily recognizable, I think, as human characters.
And it’s a fun read. It’s a love story with a mystery at its center. I had a
lot of fun writing it, and I think that comes through in the book.

CL Bledsoe is the
author of four poetry collections, one short story collection, and five novels,
including the Necro-Files series. His stories, poems, essays, plays, and
reviews have been published in hundreds of literary journals, including Cimarron Review, Barrow Street, New York
Quarterly, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Arkansas Review, Pank, Potomac Review, and
many others. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize thirteen times, Best of
the Net four times, and has had two stories selected as Notable Stories of the
year by Story South’s Million Writers
Award. Bledsoe currently lives in Alexandria, VA, with his daughter.

Currently Reading

Currently Listening To

TNBBC Merchandise

Who's That Girl?

I have been buried beneath small press and self-published review copies since 2009. My passion for supporting the small press and self publishing communities has driven me out into the world wide web to demonstrate alternative ways to spread the word about amazing publishers, authors, and novels you might never had heard of. Feeding your reading addiction, one book at a time.